Gin and television

>  Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

This man knows exactly what’s happening in new media today. I’ve not read anyone else who has managed to sum things up so well. He talks about points in history where big changes happen, and society’s reaction to those big changes. The most recent big change is this notion of free time – the ability to decide for oneself what to do for hours on end.

Starting around the 1960s, we mostly spent that watching TV. Taking the view from 100km up, we’re collectively getting bored with that, and trying other things – blogging, making videos on YouTube, playing World of Warcraft, making LOLcats – anything. These are all activities enabled by the Internet; collectively “new media”. New media is about enabling your audience to be creators as well – it’s about ultimately dispensing with the notion of “audience” and “creators” as separate groups of people. We can all create (for better or for worse). The tools are widely available and the barriers of entry are very low.

Read more about this from Clay Shirky .